MORGAN HILL, Calif.  I'm at a company called Alien
Technology. I'm thinking the board meetings must be interesting with, like,
Mork from Ork, E.T. and David Bowie around the table.

Outside is a farming community a good hour from the heart
of Silicon Valley. Here in the lobby, I'm staring at a full-size replica of
Robby the Robot from Forbidden Planet, which, as you might recall, starred
Leslie Nielsen in 1956.

The reason I'm visiting this seemingly odd outfit is that
Arno Penzias, former head of Bell Labs and now a venture capitalist, told me
it's one of the most important new companies he's seen. He's now on the board,
perhaps fitting right in. This is a guy who has a Nobel Prize in physics. You
have to figure he's smart. Looking at Robby, I'm not certain.

There's one other reason for checking this out. Alien is
raising huge amounts of venture capital. Yep. In this Godforsaken era, when
it's harder to land venture money than to find a mosh pit in Amish country,
Alien raised $55 million in August and is confident of raising even more in
another round of financing this year.

So there's got to be something here. And this is it: Alien
seems like the missing key to a bunch of advances that technologists have been
hoping to see. Those advances include thin plastic computer screens that can
be rolled up, groceries that check themselves out and eyeglasses that can't
be lost. If Alien is that key, it could unleash a torrent of innovation. Then
the company will most definitely be important.

Alien, a private company, has found a way to make tiny
1-cent computer chips and easily put them into things on a mass-production scale.
That's a first. The process is based on work done 6 years ago by J. Stephen
Smith, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley. CEO Jeff Jacobsen,
an industry veteran at 47, was hired in September 1998 to build a real company
around Smith's work. Not long after, Penzias came to check it out, and despite
seeing a lab that used such sophisticated equipment as a turkey baster, told
his venture capital firm, New Enterprise Associates, to invest.

Alien's process is as fantastic as everything else about
the company. As I sit at a conference table here, Jacobson hands me a sealed
test tube full of water and what looks like suspended silver glitter. The glitter
is actually floating computer chips, each a few times the width of a human hair
and shaped like a minuscule Ex-Lax tablet. The shape fits precisely into holes
that can be stamped into sheets of plastic in any pattern.

The plastic can be fed on rolls  like a printing
press  through a bath containing the chips. The chips fall into place,
filling every hole. Alien calls this Fluidic Self-Assembly, or FSA. The plastic
rolls through a couple of other processes that seal the chips in and connect
them to tiny wire leads. The sheet can then be cut into whatever is being made
 big flexible computer screens, or tiny displays that go on ATM cards
to show you how much money you have in your account.

FSA is a departure from current methods of embedding things
with individual chips. One method requires high heat, which would melt plastic.
That's why displays on computers and cell phones are glass. The glass can withstand
the heat, but it's heavy, breakable and inflexible  all liabilities. Another
method picks up individual chips and glues them in place, but that's too slow
and costly.

Don't get me wrong  Alien still has a lot to prove.
It hasn't mass-produced anything yet. It's building its first factory. It's
taking baby steps. "Our strategy is to start with something simple," Jacobson
says. Right now, that's a numeric display built into the plastic of a smart
card. The display shows the amount of money remaining on the card. Alien is
developing the displays under a $40 million contract with France's Gemplus,
the biggest smart card maker.

Beyond that, the possibilities are huge. In displays alone,
Jacobson's ideas include plastic screens that can be unrolled out of the side
of a cell phone, and plastic computer screens that soldiers can roll up and
carry into battle.

Motorola, Presto Technologies, E Ink and venture capitalist
Steve Jurvetson have all talked about devices and applications that would work
if only there were 1-cent, easily-embedded chips. In other words, if there were
a company like Alien.

Some of those applications would use radio frequency (RF)
tags, which are cheap chips attached to tiny radio antennas. RF tags can send
and receive little bits of information. Alien's FSA is a way to mass-produce
RF tags  possibly the best way to make super-cheap RF tags and put them
into anything.

The tags could be attached to all packaged goods, each
tag encoded with the item and price. Then, if you walk out a grocery store's
door with a full shopping cart, all the RF tags could send the store's computer
a blip saying those items are being bought. That's it  you're checked
out. No having to stare at a teenager's multiple piercings while she operates
the register.

Penzias likes the eyeglasses example. Embed an RF tag in
every pair of glasses. You lose your glasses, you go to a special Web site,
which listens the world over for a little ping from your glasses' RF tag. The
site shows that you left them on the bar at Thirsty's. The only alarming part
is that you only vaguely remember even being at the bar at Thirsty's.

There is no shortage of ideas flying Alien's way. Silicon
Valley executives keep driving here to see what's up. Intel wanted to invest
but was turned away. Philips and Dow Chemical are investors. "Japanese companies
come in here all the time, and they start saying, 'We can do this and this and
this,' " says Stan Drobac, a vice president. "We're running out of bandwidth
to chase more things."

For now, Alien just wants to get going on smart cards.
Then, Jacobson says, it might move into plastic displays for cell phones and
palmtop computers. After that, who knows?

Jacobson at times seems barely able to contain his giddiness
about Alien's good fortune. He's so confident, he's even willing to spend some
of that rarified venture money on a full-size Terminator replica that can join
Robby in the lobby. He's got his order in.

When you've got a technology that seems momentous, you
can be as weird as you want to be.